Have you tried changing which background imagery you're using? The "Esri World Imagery" option for your area appears to have been taken during the winter, so there are far fewer leaves blocking the view.

(If you don't know how to change it, it's under the "Background settings" tab, the one that looks sort of like three stacked sheets of paper.)

There are four types of queries that an end user is likely to perform on a value:

"One": "I want a restaurant that serves Italian, and I don't care what else it serves"

"Exact": "I want a restaurant that serves Italian and nothing else"

"Any": "I want a restaurant that serves Italian or Chinese, and I don't care what else it serves"

"All": "I want a restaurant that serves both Italian and Chinese"

The first two are easy to perform on a semicolon-delimited list: they are a substring search and a string match, respectively. The third and fourth are where semicolons fail: you need to actively parse the list, perform multiple substring matches, or otherwise jump through hoops. Fortunately, most people looking for somewhere to eat are looking for a "One" query, so semicolon lists are fine.

This doesn't apply for other things like auto repair, where an "All" query such as "I want four new tires and an oil change" are reasonably likely.

The addition of the cuisine=* in the last case is maybe not even necessary, as hamburgers are core business in any fast food restaurant.

You should probably tell Taco Bell, Subway, Panda Express, and any number of pizza joints that they're doing it wrong. You might consider "fast food" to be a type of food; I (and probably most other people) consider it a type of food service.

If you're referring to the grid pattern in the forest, it's real: the Pacific Railroad Acts granted alternating square miles of land extending to the sides of the track to the companies building the transcontinental railroads. In rural areas of the western United States, much of this ownership pattern still exists.

People who get lost in the woods are almost never abducted. They twist an ankle, or run out of water, or eat the wrong berries, or come off second-best in a struggle with an insane squirrel, but abduction? Almost never happens.

There's a confounding factor that I don't think your data accounts for: there's been a trend from mapping points of interest as nodes to mapping them as areas. This will tend to inflate the "nodes created" count (something that, in the beginning, would have been mapped as one node is now four or more), and at the same time, will tend to decrease the "nodes modified" count (if a building changes ownership, the tags on the area will change, but since the building structure is unchanged, the nodes won't be modified).

It's not just natural language that's the problem. The thing that's been bothering me lately is "amenity=fuel". According to the wiki, available gasoline grades should be indicated using the European RON system, but American fuels are graded using the AKI system, and you can't mechanically convert between the two. For reasonable hydrocarbon blends, an AKI 87 fuel (the most common grade in the US) could be anywhere between RON 91 and RON 93 -- which means you can't tag correctly.

Since you can reasonably assume that any American gas station will have AKI 87 and AKI 93 (or their elevation-adjusted equivalents), I've given up on trying to map them, and I'm just concentrating on identifying stations with diesel (which you can't blindly assume that any given station will have).

The problem with gamification, and with metrics in general, is that you get what you measure. If you reward people for the number of widgets produced, you get hastily-made, low-quality widgets. If you reward the QA team per bug report filed, you get backroom deals where the programmers agree to include easy-to-spot bugs.

In the Missing Maps case, the leaderboard rewards people for number of edits (the default sort order) and to a lesser extent, the number of buildings and length of road mapped.

Edit count is easy to game: submit one edit per building or per road segment. This doesn't have any downside to the finished product, but does have an unfortunate impact on the internal workflow: checking recent changes becomes much harder, because of the increased volume of data.

The other two categories are more problematic. Rewarding for length of road biases people towards finding "roads" that are actually dry riverbeds, or animal trails, or field boundaries, or other things that look similar on an aerial photograph. Rewarding for building count means you'll get "buildings" that are actually rock formations, or off-color dirt patches, or the like.

In the worst-case scenario, you could get people sabotaging each others' efforts in order to maximize their own credit. I don't think a simple leaderboard is sufficient incentive to do this, but given some of the things I've seen people do on Wikipedia, I wouldn't be surprised if it was.